Linux Sysstat Utilities For Monitoring System Performance

Linux has a lot of different system metrics and performance monitoring tools. Sysstats provide a bunch of tools for monitoring purposes. This project is maintained by Sebastien Godard. This tool collects and reports system activity information about different aspects of the system like CPU, network, disk, tape, io, etc. Sysstat tool dependencies are low which makes it great for minimal or low resource systems. Sysstat tool suite consists of the following tools.

sar

iostat

tapestat

mpstat

pidstat

sadf

cifsiostat

Installation

Installation is very easy for a lot of distributions. We will look at mainstream distributions and package management tools about how to install sysstat.

Ubuntu, Debian, Kali, Mint:

$ sudo apt install sysstat

Sysstat Ubuntu, Debian, Kali, Mint:

Fedora, RedHat, CentOS:

$ yum install sysstat

Information

Some information about the sysstat package can get from the following screenshot.

Information

Sar

System Activity Reporter or simply Sar is the most popular tool of sysstat tool suite. Sar provides features for general metrics on a Linux operating system.

Iostat

Io start is mainly used for CPU IO information. Iostat provides detailed information like devices and their IO rates on CPU.

Tapestat

Tapestat as its name suggests used for monitoring activity of taped drives those connected to the Linux system.

Mpstat

Mpstat is used to report processor related statistics. It provides information from the processor point of view and gives information about the utilization of CPU.

Pidstat

This tool provides information about the processes running on the Linux server. All process, single processor child processes can be monitored with this tool.

Sadf

Sadf is an umbrella tool used for displaying data collected with different sysstat tools like sar, iostat, pidstat etc. . Sadf also supports to export in different formats like CSV, XML, etc.